The Pope Who Would Be King, page 39
In 2000, to mark the end of the second millennium, Pope John Paul II decided to beatify two of his predecessors. In an apparent effort to keep all in the church happy, he combined the beatification of Pope John XXIII, convener of the Second Vatican Council and hero of the liberals, with that of Pius IX, convener of the First Vatican Council and hero of the conservatives. In his remarks that day, John Paul II explained why he regarded Pius IX as worthy of sainthood:
Amid the turbulent events of his time, he was an example of unconditional fidelity to the immutable deposit of revealed truths. Faithful to the duties of his ministry in every circumstance, he always knew how to give absolute primacy to God and to spiritual values. His lengthy pontificate was not at all easy and he had much to suffer in fulfilling his mission of service to the Gospel. He was much loved, but also hated and slandered.
However, it was precisely in these conflicts that the light of his virtues shone most brightly: these prolonged sufferings tempered his trust in divine Providence, whose sovereign lordship over human events he never doubted. This was the source of Pius IX’s deep serenity, even amid the misunderstandings and attacks of so many hostile people.21
The man on whom Pius IX relied so heavily in those troubled times, Giacomo Antonelli, has not, in death, been treated so kindly. He served as the pope’s guide from the time he stood at Pius’s side in their Gaeta exile until his death in 1876. He piloted the Holy See through times when its very survival seemed in doubt. For the easily excitable and naïve pope, more comfortable in the spiritual than the political realm, he was the invaluable steady hand who remained cool in every crisis.
Few would mourn the cardinal’s death. To the partisans of the new Italian nation, of course, he was a villain, but he was scarcely better liked within the church. Rumors of his alleged mistresses had long circulated, along with gossip about his collection of precious gems, his love of wealth, and his penchant for using his position to enrich members of his family. Nor was his reputation helped by rumors that he had left little of his large fortune to the church. It suffered a further blow when, sometime after his death, a young woman, claiming to be his illegitimate daughter, sued the Antonelli estate. Although she lost the case in the end, the gleeful attention given the proceedings in the press did nothing to help the cardinal’s cause.22
* * *
—
THE STORY TOLD IN THESE PAGES recounts the death throes of the popes’ thousand-year kingdom. But it reaches far beyond, for it is also the story of the death of a doctrine of faith that had a huge impact on the course of Western civilization. If the pope himself could no longer claim to have been divinely ordained to rule his land, how could any other monarch claim such a right?
This world of the divine right of rulers, its roots in ancient times, first came under threat by the subversive ideas of the Enlightenment, its flames then fanned by the French Revolution. The marriage of aristocracy and church that had for centuries proved such a durable basis for rule began to give way amid calls for popular sovereignty, rule by and for the people. With the fall of the pope-king, the rationale for people elsewhere to accept their humble places in society as God’s will, their leaders as supernaturally sanctioned, could not long survive.
The Enlightenment transformed the West but passed other parts of the world by. Claims to rule by religious authority are not hard to find today; nor are movements that justify their own pretensions to power as acting as God’s agents on earth. The baleful results of this continued brew of religious and political authority are all too clear, whether in the cold repression enforced by religious police or in the bloody battles waged in God’s name.
But before we in the West become too smug in dismissing such ideas as medieval, and congratulate ourselves for having long championed religious freedom and the separation of church and state, we might take a closer look at our own history. Well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, Pius IX and the Roman Catholic Church condemned ideas of religious freedom, of freedom of speech and of the press, and of the separation of church and state as incompatible with Christianity. It was only in the 1960s, with the Second Vatican Council, that the Roman Catholic Church fully rejected this medieval vision.
Nor does one have to look hard to find many in the West today who lament the abandonment of the old verities, who look back nostalgically to the not-so-long-ago days when government was guided by religious authority. Like Pius IX, they fault modern times for turning away from God. The pope-king’s rearguard battle is far from over. Throughout much of the world, it continues still.
* Curiously, the head of the confraternity here refers to the condemned man as il paziente, “the patient,” employing a medical metaphor and giving a new meaning to the phrase “The operation was a success, but the patient died.”
For Anouk and Naho
I am grateful to the many people who helped me along the way as I plunged into one of Europe’s great historical dramas. I also feel thankful that, working in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I have resources for shedding light on this history that my predecessors of the nineteenth and twentieth did not.
There is no better example of this than the Google digitization project, which has resulted in the electronic availability of the hundreds of published memoirs and other published materials of mid-nineteenth-century Europe that illuminate the events described in this book. To consult them in the past, I would have had to wander the libraries of the United States and Europe, in many cases only to find fragile volumes, able only to scribble notes by hand. What in the past would have taken years to accomplish can now be done in a few days. One need only have access to the HathiTrust database, look up the books or periodicals needed from the nineteenth century, and download them. As they are fully searchable, tracking down relevant material in many cases is a matter of minutes rather than hours.
The modern digital age has transformed archival work as well. Rather than keeping notes on thousands of cards or, as more recent historians did, making thousands of photocopies, we can now make (or have made) digital copies of all archival documents of interest. Having thousands of documents on the computer, retrievable instantly, offers unparalleled possibilities for analysis.
Let me begin my thanks by acknowledging the great research help given me by two Italian historians, Alessandro Visani and Roberto Benedetti. Their work in the archives was invaluable. Tragically, Alessandro died recently.
I would also like to thank all the archivists who helped facilitate this research, including those at the Archivio Segreto Vaticano at Vatican City, and the archivists at the two branches of the Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères at La Courneuve and at Nantes. Special thanks to the director of the historical archive of the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento at Rome, Marco Pizzo, for his generosity and his deep expertise in the archival sources for this history. Thanks, too, to the director of the Archivio Storico della Comunità Ebraica di Roma, Silvia Haia Antonucci, and to Gabriella Franzone, Micol Ferrara, and the late Giancarlo Spizzichino for their help with my research there.
I am indebted to John Davis and Roberto Benedetti for their comments on an earlier draft of this book, and to friends who answered questions that came up along the way, including Massimo Riva, Kevin Madigan, and Carl Kramer. Thanks as well to Nina Valbousquet and Gilles Boquerat for their help in dealing with the French archives, and to the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trent and Francesca Decimo for hosting me there as a visiting professor while I was finishing this book.
For the past quarter century, I have had a most congenial academic home at Brown University, which has offered great support for my research efforts. Special thanks are due to Paul Dupee, Jr., for establishing the chair that first brought me to Brown and that has continued to support my work. Thanks also to the staff of the anthropology department—Matilde Andrade, Mariesa Fischer, and Marjorie Sugrue—for all their help. I am grateful to the staff at the Brown University libraries and at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown, and to its director, Ed Steinfeld, for providing me with a congenial and supportive environment. I would also like to thank my talented undergraduate research assistant, Talia Rueschemeyer-Bailey, for all her good efforts.
For their support and advice on this book project, I am indebted to my literary agent, Wendy Strothman, and also to David Ebershoff, my former editor at Random House who has now turned his attention full-time to his own writing. Thanks as well to my astute editor, Hilary Redmon, and to Caitlin McKenna, at Random House, for their help shaping this book, and to Laura Hartman Maestro for the two impressive maps she prepared for these pages.
I dedicate this book to my two new granddaughters, Anouk, born while I was in the midst of writing it, and her little sister, Naho, born just in time.
THE FOLLOWING ABBREVIATIONS ARE USED IN THE ENDNOTES
ARSI Archivium Romanum Societatis Iesu, Roma
ASCER Archivio Storico della Comunità Ebraica di Roma
CO. Corrispondenza
ASR Archivio di Stato di Roma
ASV Archivio Segreto Vaticano
ANH Archivio, Nunziatura di Madrid
ANN Archivio, Nunziatura di Napoli
ANV Archivio, Nunziatura di Vienna
SEGR. ST. Segreteria di Stato
ASVR Archivo Storico del Vicariato di Roma
BFSP British and Foreign State Papers
BSMC Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Roma
FS Fondo Spada, BSMC, online at www.repubblicaromana-1849.it/index.php?4/fondospada
DRS La diplomazia del Regno di Sardegna durante la Prima Guerra d’Indipendenza, 3 vols. (see References)
MAEC Archives, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, La Courneuve (France)
CP Correspondance Politique: Autriche, Espagne, Naples, Rome
MD Mémoires et Documents, Rome
PAR Papiers d’Agents, Rayneval
PAW Papiers d’Agents, Walewski
PDI Personnel, Dossiers Individuels de Carrière
MAEN Archives, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Nantes (France)
RSS Rome Saint-Siege
MCRR Archivio, Museo Centrale del Risorgimento, Rome
TL Times of London
CITATIONS OF ARCHIVAL SOURCES
An. Anno/year
b. busta/box
bis supplementary page or volume
f. foglio/page
fasc. fascicolo/folder
ff. fogli/pages
ms. manuscript
n. number
r. recto
Rubr. rubrica/heading
v. verso
vol. volume
PROLOGUE
1. Gutierez de Estrada a Lützow, ministro d’Austria presso la Santa Sede, Roma, 26 novembre 1849, in Blaas 1973, pp. 28–31; Liedekerke à Monsieur le Baron, Rome, 24 novembre 1848, reproduced in Liedekerke 1949, pp. 115–20.
2. This description is based on the account provided in the Dutch ambassador’s March 18, 1848, letter to his foreign minister, reproduced in Liedekerke 1949, pp. 21–22.
3. Harcourt au ministre des affaires étrangères, 17 novembre 1848, MAEC, CP, Rome, vol. 988, ff. 146–47.
4. The pope’s prayer is from Psalm 51, Miserere. The quote from the New Testament is from Matthew 26:39–41. This scene is described by Filippani’s daughter, Cittadini 1989, p. 99.
5. There are many contrasting accounts of the pope’s escape from Rome. Some of the disparities can be explained by the political motives of the chroniclers, not least those linked to the French ambassador who, in retrospect, looked so naïve. Others may simply reflect the chaos enveloping Rome at the time. British readers were told that, with the French ambassador in the pope’s bedroom, Pius donned the livery of the Bavarian legation, disguising himself as the Bavarian ambassador’s servant: “The Escape of the Pope,” Times, December 7, 1848. The primary sources employed in my account are Berra 1957; Cittadini 1989, pp. 99–101; Mollat 1939, pp. 277–79; Spaur 1851, pp. 17–21; Lancellotti 1862, p. 25; Simeoni 1932, p. 255.
CHAPTER 1: THE CONCLAVE
1. Wiseman 1858, pp. 420–22, 504–6; Martina 1974, pp. 60–61. Johan Koelman, a Dutch painter living in Rome at the time, remarked that he had never heard anyone say a good word about the pope: Koelman 1963, vol. 1, pp. 29, 32–33.
2. Herzen’s (1996, pp. 72–75) comments were made in December 1847. More brutally, in April 1849, another foreign visitor of the time, the English poet Arthur Clough (1888, p. 146), wrote: “Rome in general might be called a rubbishy place.”
3. Story 1864, vol. 2, pp. 38–52.
4. “The barber,” observed a Frenchman in Rome, “accomplishes his task in open air with a speed that would do honor to Figaro himself.” Toytot 1868, p. 33.
5. Moroni 1851, pp. 239–48 (“Parrocchia”); Demarco 1949, pp. 188–90; Desmarie 1860, pp. 29–31.
6. Half of the Papal States’ population of three million consisted of peasants who worked in the fields, and another quarter million were employed as servants. Demarco 1947, pp. 25–29; Demarco 1949, pp. 24–29; Negro 1966, p. 149.
7. Desmarie 1860, p. 40; Gillespie 1845, pp. 157–59.
8. Desmarie 1860, pp. 27–30.
9. “Conclave de 1846,” MAEN, RSS 588; Gizzi 1996–97, pp. 111–14; Martina and Gramatowski 1996, p. 163; Gajani 1856, pp. 294–95.
10. Oxilia 1933, p. 583; Chiron 2001, p. 41; Matsumoto-Best 2003, pp. 12–14.
11. Roncalli 1972, p. 190.
12. On the veto, see “Veto,” MAEN, RSS 588; Gillespie 1845, p. 150. On Metternich, see Nunzio di Vienna a Lambruschini, Vienna, 19 febbraio 1836, doc. 30 in Manzini 1960, pp. 597–98; Ward 1970, pp. 50–53; Dumreicher 1883, pp. 96–117.
13. For Metternich’s letter to the Belgian king, see Manzini 1960, pp. 603–4. Metternich sent instructions to the cardinal archbishop of Milan—which, along with the rest of northeastern Italy, was then part of the Austrian Empire—to use Austria’s veto to prevent the election of Cardinal Bernetti, Pope Gregory’s first secretary of state. It seems what Metternich wanted above all was a pope who regarded Vienna as his best friend and kept a distance from Austria’s archrival, France. Metternich thought Bernetti too close to France. In any case, Metternich’s veto arrived in Rome only after the new pope had been elected. Martina 1974, p. 87; Bortolotti 1945, pp. 83, 114–22.
14. François Guizot à Pellegrino Rossi, letters of instructions dated June 8 and June 17, 1846, MAEN, RSS 272. See also Ideville 1887, p. 142; Bortolotti 1945, pp. 11–12. None of the French cardinals made it to Rome in time for the conclave, so the question of the French veto was moot.
15. Foreign minister, Naples, to Giuseppe Ludolf, ambassador, Rome, June 6, 1846, in Cipolletta 1863, pp. 231–32; Arcuno 1933, pp. 4–11.
16. Count Ludolf to foreign minister, Naples, June 6, 1846, in Cipolletta 1863, pp. 229–30; Bortolotti 1945, pp. 97–99, 108–13.
17. Giampaolo 1931, pp. 1, 8–9, 81–82; Monsagrati 2004; Regoli 2011, p. 313; Manzini 1960, pp. 448, 488–90, 653–55; Piscitelli 1953, p. 159. Lützow to Metternich, 23 août 1842, in Bortolotti 1945, pp. 99n–103n. On Lambruschini, see Giampaolo 1931; Regoli 2011; Monsagrati 2004. That Lambruschini’s fame as an inflexible reactionary lives on in the Vatican can be seen by the reaction in 2005 of the then newly appointed secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, when asked about being the first monk appointed to that office since Lambruschini. “For goodness sake,” replied Bertone, “don’t compare me to Lambruschini!” (Regoli 2011, p. 309).
18. “Conclave de 1846,” MAEN, RSS 588; Gajani 1856, pp. 308–12; Pelczar 1909, pp. 104–9; Balleydier 1847, pp. 17–18; Martina and Gramatowski 1996, pp. 206–7; Gizzi 1996–97, pp. 183–86. The cardinals in conclave were not completely cut off, for they each had their meals prepared by their own servants and brought to them every day in a large basket containing tablecloth, silverware, plates, and the meals themselves. Ventura 1848, p. 74.
19. Ventura 1848, pp. 72–82.
20. The detail on the condition specified by Pius VII is given in Chiron 2001, p. 24. Much of my description of Mastai’s early years relies on Chiron’s biography, but also useful was Falconi 1981.
21. Chiron 2001, pp. 41–43.
22. Lützow to Metternich, Rome, 23 août 1842, in Bortolotti 1945, p. 104n; Chiron 2001, pp. 46–47.
23. Martina 1974, pp. 89–90.
24. Martina 1974, p. 92; Gizzi 1996–97, pp. 197–98; Cittadini 1986, p. 23. Historical accounts contain many dramatic descriptions of this scene that appear to be apocryphal, including ones claiming that Cardinal Mastai fainted on realizing he was to be pope, and Lambruschini passing out for the opposite reason. Cardinal Bernetti, who had reason to think he might himself be elected, is said to have uttered, as the vote was cast electing Mastai, “Oh great! After a cop, we’ll have a little girl!” Bianchi 1869, vol. 5, pp. 8–9; Pio 1878, p. 31. The previous conclave, which had elected Gregory XVI, had lasted fifty days.
25. Martina and Gramatowski 1996, pp. 210–11; Ventura 1848, pp. 6–7, 97–99; Martina 1974, pp. 93–94; Koelman 1963, vol. 1, pp. 43–45; Minghetti 1889, vol. 1, p. 190; “Conclave de Pie IX, 1846,” 7 octobre 1891, MAEN, RSS 588. The delay between the election of the new pope and the public announcement caused an embarrassing spectacle for one of the conclave’s most prominent cardinals. Fifty-eight-year-old Pasquale Gizzi, of noble family and having served in many important diplomatic posts for the Holy See, returned from the Quirinal following the conclave to find his servants, still drunk following a night of celebration, smashing all his crockery, judged too modest for his exalted new status. They had already thrown all of his cardinal robes into the fire. The rumor had reached them the previous night that it was their master who had been elected pope, and following custom, they had celebrated by burning his now no-longer-needed cardinal’s attire. They had also gotten word to his hometown, south of Rome, where the overjoyed inhabitants had likewise spent the night in wild celebration. Gizzi 1995, p. 133; Gizzi 1996–97, p. 200; Koelman 1963, vol. 1, pp. 44–45.
